Friday Fun

Friday is filled with great tv but I don’t usually get the chance to watch it because I’m busy with friends.  Since I’m at home this Friday though, I’m enjoying keeping up with my Friday night line-up.  For my dose of reality tv for the night, I love TLC’s Say Yes to the Dress, a show about Kleinfeld’s Bridal shop in New York City.  I love weddings and hope to someday be a wedding planner so I just love watching this show.  The best thing about Say Yes is the salon’s fashion director, Randy Fenoli, who works with the consultants in finding dresses.  He’s just awesome; he knows every dress in the store and he’s hilarious with the brides.  Say Yes to the Dress is always a fun show to watch and you get to see some truly amazing fashion!

While I love Say Yes, my favorite Friday night show is Blue Bloods.  Blue Bloods is in its first year and the reason I started watching it was because I have a huge crush on one of the main characters Will Estes.  I am actually surprised that I actually ended up loving the show.  It’s a cop show like Law and Order: SVU but they focus on more than sex crimes.  The cop aspect of Blue Bloods is much stronger than SVU because the show focuses on a cop family.  The family patriarch (Tom Selleck) is the Police Commissioner, his two sons are police officers and his daughter is an ADA.  While a large portion of the show does focus on police cases, the main focus is always on the family dynamic in the show.  I’m a very family-oriented person so I really love that aspect of the show and my favorite scenes from the show are always the Sunday night dinners with the whole family in tow.  They argue about all their cases and politics and police work in general and the atmosphere just feels like a very real family.  When I watch this show, I think about my own family and hope that we’ll remain close as we grow older, just like this fictional tv family.

Undead Thursday

Thursday nights are home to my favorite show, the Vampire Diaries.  A couple years ago I joined most of America’s teenage girl population and became obsessed with the Twilight series, the books and the movies.  The Vampire Diaries came out about a year after my vampire obsession started and I didn’t watch it right away but over Christmas break freshman year, there was a marathon of all the episodes and I got hooked.  The reason I like vampires in this show and the Twilight vampires are because they are so much more human than I ever expected vampires to be.  In the Vampire Diaries, the vampires can eat, drink, sleep and can even walk in the sun (with a little help from the witches, of course).  A dagger to the heart still kills them but it has to be straight through the heart because they can be stabbed anywhere else and not die.  Also, the two main vampires on the show, brothers Stefan and Damon Salvatore, are insanely gorgeous which makes the show even better.  Stefan is dating the main character Elena, who happens to be a doppelganger for Katherine, the vampire who made Stefan and Damon vampires and claimed to love them both but then disappeared.  But, I don’t want to get that involved in the whole storyline because it would take me about five pages to adequately explain everything that is happening on the show right now.  Also, vampires aren’t the only supernatural beings on this show because witches and werewolves also wander the town of Mystic Falls.  In fact, Elena’s best friend Bonnie just happens to be a witch, who only wants to use her powers for good.  And the bad boy in town, Tyler, has recently transformed into a werewolf but he just ran away from home so the werewolf storyline is gone for now.  There is so much I want to say about how amazing this show is but I don't want to confuse anyone by just giving parts of the whole storyline.  Seriously, though everyone should watch this show!  I’m not into sci-fi at all and am not a supernatural nerd but I still think this show is beyond addicting, I avoid missing it every Thursday at all costs.

I also like watching the Office on Thursdays but that’s a repeat this week so I can’t be bothered with it this week.  And of course, Jersey Shore is usually on Thursdays but the season ended last week so that depresses me a bit.    

Wednesday Night: SVU

My Wednesday night tv lineup is usually the strange combination of the hilarious and family-oriented Modern Family and the slightly gross and creepy Law and Order: SVU.  Unfortunately, Modern Family, like most of tv shows at this time, is a repeat and I cannot partake in that tonight because of the mountain of homework sitting next to me.

So now I get to wait until 10 to watch SVU.  Honestly, one of the main reasons I watch SVU is because the main character, Elliot Stabler (aka Christopher Meloni) is very attractive.  The only reason I even started watching the show was because my Dad has a huge crush on Mariska Hargitay, the lead female on the show.  The show is in its 13^th season and has gotten very repetitive in the storylines.  Worse than that, the storylines have become increasingly disturbing as the years pass.  Last week’s episode involved twins who were involved in a disgusting case of incest with each other and a couple weeks ago focused on an old man’s longings for small girls.  SVU stands for special victims unit, and the opening of the show says this “elite unit” was created to deal with sex crimes.  I’m the first to admit that they’ve become a bit repetitive with narrowing sex crimes down to just rape or abuse but the recent storylines seem too farfetched.  The episode with the twins not only included their incest but there was also a swinger’s club thrown in there with a case of relationship abuse.  It seems like the chances of all those things being linked to one case are close to impossible but on SVU that’s normally the case.  One of my favorite people on the show is the medical examiner Melinda Warner.  She fascinates me with all the cool tests she can run on a dead person’s body and how she can find out how a person died just by weighing their organs and their body temperature.  I also love the FBI psychologist George Huang who can diagnose any creep who is dragged into SVU.  These two are really the brains behind the whole SVU team and they are always the ones with the best scenes and the most interesting info.  Hopefully tonight’s episode will be worth watching because a character from the past, ADA (assistant defense attorney) Casey Novak is coming back and she was always entertaining to watch before she left.  But I’m definitely excited for next week when Modern Family finally has a new episode and I can get my mid-week laughs back.

Gleeful Tuesdays

Tuesday night is one of the best tv nights because one of my favorite shows is on Tuesdays which is Glee.  Unfortunately, Glee is on hiatus for the next two weeks but since every other show on tv is also a repeat tonight, I’ll stick with a Glee repeat any day!  My favorite part about Glee is the music because they do such a variety of music and for the most part, they all have good voices.  In their last newest episode where they went to the glee club Regional championship, they did original songs which were amazing.  A good portion of my iTunes library is devoted to Glee songs and what I like best about them is that most of them aren’t the exact same as the original and there’s always a twist or a change in tempo in the Glee versions.  For example, tonight’s Glee episode is a religious episode and Kurt (aka Chris Colfer, who is one of the best performers on the show) sings the Beatles “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” but performs it differently than the original and it gives me chills when I watch him sing it.  Besides the singing, the next best thing on Glee is Sue Sylvester (aka Jane Lynch).  Sue has made it her life goal to destroy the Glee club and tries to pit the kids against each other and spends most of her time making fun of the glee teacher, Mr. Schue.  However, despite the awesome music and guaranteed laughs in every episode, Glee’s been getting a lot of negativity from two recent episodes, one about alcohol and the other about sex.

Since Glee focuses on a glee club filled with dramatic artist types, everything on the show is usually amplified with drama.  In the alcohol episode, the glee kids had a party filled with alcohol and then proceeded to drink at school the next day and again before they performed during the alcohol awareness ceremony.  Basically, most of the glee kids were walking around drunk the whole episode and even went as far as drinking at school.  As for the sex education episode, Gwyneth Paltrow starred as the sex-ed teacher and introduced the subject by singing “Do You Wanna Touch Me There” while wearing a tight, leather outfit.  Needless to say, if she had done that performance at a real-life high school, she would have been fired by the next morning as it was extremely inappropriate to do for high school students.  While these episodes were definitely over the top, it is a tv show, not real life.  In my experience, tv shows are always over the top and show the extremes of most situations so I don’t think these episodes were a big deal.  Anyone else have any thoughts about Glee’s over the top alcohol and sex episodes?
http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/reviews/2011-03-15-glee15_ST_N.htm
Here's USA Today's take on the sex episode.

Also, for all you who were wondering, Wendy Williams got voted off Dancing with the Stars.     

Monday Night Dancing!

My Monday night television lineup usually consists of Gossip Girl but since that’s on hiatus, I thought I’d try and get into this season of Dancing with the Stars.  I’m a pretty big reality tv fan (Jersey Shore anyone?) but this has never been one of my favorites.  This is Dancing’s eleventh season and the fourth episode this season so they are already down one celebrity (Mike Catherwood).  Mike Catherwood represents my main problem with this show because he’s a “celebrity” but I have absolutely no idea who he is and I read tabloids pretty religiously.  The “celebrities” are d-list and below celebrities and that makes me angry because I have no idea who they are.  At this point, some of the dancers on the show are more famous than the celebrities they are paired with.  The remaining ten celebrities are Chelsea Kane, Chris Jericho, Hines Ward, Kendra Wilkinson, Kirstie Alley, Petra Nemcova, Ralph Macchio, Romeo, Sugar Ray Leonard and Wendy Williams.  For the past two weeks, the highest scorers have been Kirstie Alley, Hines Ward and Ralph Macchio and (mention this week’s performances).  The lowest scorers have been Wendy Williams, Petra Nemcova and Kendra Wilkinson who all had scores below 20 for both weeks.

This week’s show got off to a really rocky start with Wendy William’s foxtrot which earned her 15 points and looked extremely awkward.  Chelsea Kane came next with a cha cha cha that earned 23 points and was very good although her outfit was a little too revealing.  The first male celeb of the night was Chris Jericho who got a 21 on his rumba which was a tribute to his mother.  Kendra Wilkinson and Romeo followed doing a samba which earned Kendra 23 points and a rumba which earned Romeo 20.  Both dances showed good technical work but were a bit boring.  The next two dances were by Hines Ward and Petra Nemcova who both earned 25 points for their fun cha cha cha and classy waltz.  Sugar Ray Leonard was next with a dull rumba that surprisingly earned him a fairly solid 20 points.  The last two performances were from Kirstie Alley and Ralph Macchio who both earned 21 points and both did good rumbas.  Kirstie’s dance partner, Max pulled his thigh muscle at the beginning of the dance which led to a rough start to their dance but they managed to finish strong.  Overall I was really underwhelmed by the whole episode, which did not need to be stretched out to 2 hours.  But maybe I just don't know enough about dancing to really appreciate some of the slower dances.  Do you all agree with my thoughts on the night or do you think I was too harsh/easy on the celebs??  All I know is that after watching this episode of Dancing, I will most definitely be sticking to Gossip Girl for my dose of Monday television.